Council's Public Safety Chair: "We Don't Have the Luxury" of Being Picky About Police Test Scores
Also, the council considers a $500 ticket for street racing.
By Erica C. Barnett
City Council public safety committee chair Bob Kettle took some time at the beginning of this week's committee meeting to address what he called misleading media reports about the city council's efforts to replace the current police hiring test, provided by the National Testing Network, with a test used in smaller jurisdictions that has a 90 percent passing rate, provided by Public Safety Testing.
"One of the things in these articles, they keep speaking to the fact that the legislation that we recently passed was to replace the NTN [test] ... with the Public Safety Test. That was never the case with our legislation. It was all about augmenting the NTN with the PST test," Kettle said.
We can't speak to anyone else's coverage, but PubliCola accurately reported that Council President Sara Nelson originally broached the idea of replacing the NTN test with the PST test, then walked that plan back after the Public Safety Civil Service Commission (PSCSC) reminded her that the city council can't dictate what test the independent commission uses.
The legislation Nelson introduced said the PSCSC "should seek to use" the PST test—defined, in the bill's legalese, as the test "that is also used by law enforcement agencies operating in King County, and geographically contiguous counties, and that provides greater access to candidates who wish to make multiple applications with such local law enforcement agencies."
The bill that eventually passed no longer mentions a specific test, saying only that the PSCSC should seek to use a test "that conforms to the extent possible to all City of Seattle policies that address recruiting, hiring, and retention."
PSCSC director Andrea Scheele told PubliCola that it has never been "an option for the city of Seattle to use two exams. Other jurisdictions might do it, but the city of Seattle is the largest law enforcement agency, serving the greatest number of people, in the state—more than twice as many as the next largest city, which is Spokane."
Whatever exam the city uses, it has to comply with the federal consent decree and test for qualities Seattle has identified as priorities, including problem solving, empathy, and the ability to make decisions without racial bias. According to a PSCSC report released last week, that means PST would have to create a customized test for Seattle, and officer candidates would have to take that test; they couldn't just "transfer" their application over from a different jurisdiction that uses a more generic PST test.
Additionally, PST's test has not been "validated" to confirm that test results predict actual job performance—in other words, that people who score higher on the entrance exam perform better as cops than those with lower scores.
Kettle said he liked the idea of ranking applicants by their test scores and hiring only highly ranked applicants, but added that the city no longer has that luxury because the previous council drove down police applications. (Police hiring and recruitment declined nationwide after the murder of George Floyd sparked a racial reckoning and short-lived debate about the role of police in maintaining public safety.)
"That would be applicable if, for example, we were looking for two out of 10 qualified candidates," Kettle said. "But the bottom line, sadly, and [this] just comes out of the actions of the previous council, is that we're dealing with a situation where we need 10 of 10 qualified candidates."
The qualifying test, Kettle continued, is "just the first step" in hiring and there are many more stages, including the time a new officer spends on "probation," where SPD can filter out people who are unfit to be officers.
PST told the PSCSC that it “does not want to provide police testing services for the City of Seattle right now," according to a report released last week.
Kettle noted that most Seattle police officers come from inside Washington state, "and that's a problem, because PST is the most used [test] in Washington State. ... This fact puts us at a disadvantage, a major disadvantage, when we're trying to recruit against neighboring jurisdictions."
Scheele called this comment "confusing. ... Yes, most of our Seattle applicants are from in-state, and they seem to be applying just fine using NTN. It sort of proves the point that [the NTN test] is accessible to say that most of our hires are from within Washington, and it’s just a guess to say that we would get more applicants" by switching to a different test, she said.
During the same meeting, the committee discussed new legislation, initiated by the City Attorney's Office, that will let the city impose a $500 fine on the registered owner of any vehicle an officer sees engaged in street racing, including vehicles in videos posted online (though not automated traffic cameras, which are governed by a state law that limits how they can be used). Kettle, who's sponsoring the bill, said it would help address the "creation" and "reinforcing of this permissive environment" in Seattle.
As council members and police observed during the presentation, street racers often take off their license plates or trade them out to prevent cops from identifying them, so it's unclear how many people will actually be subject to the new tickets. Also, people don't always pay tickets for moving violations—for instance, Kevin Dave, the police officer who struck and killed Jaahnavi Kandula in a crosswalk while driving nearly three times the legal speed limit, has failed to pay the $5,000 negligent driving fine that was his only legal punishment for Kandula's death.
Traffic calming measures like speed bumps and narrower streets can deter racing in specific hot spots, but so far, the council has not proposed addressing street racing with proposals to make it harder to break traffic laws.
Ok, this is another Erica-classic. Fellow citizens, this is the kind of dogged, thorough reporting that gets utterly smothered in large, metropolitan, corporate-owned media spheres. We need these individual journalists who remain committed to turning away from the power>corruption>power cycle that relies on the masses’ vulnerability to the irresistible rewards of maintaining the status quo.
Thanks, Erica Barnett!
I grudgingly subscribed because of Erica's excellent local news coverage. Rob Saka, I'm watching.